This disclosure relates generally to online systems, and more specifically to presenting media content to online system users.
Online systems, such as social networking systems, allow users to connect to and to communicate with other users of the online system. Users may create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Online systems allow users to easily communicate and to share content with other online system users by providing content to an online system for presentation to other users. Content provided to an online system by a user may be declarative information provided by a user, status updates, check-ins to locations, images, photographs, videos, text data, or any other information a user wishes to share with additional users of the online system. An online system may also generate content for presentation to a user, such as content describing actions taken by other users on the online system.
More and more users consume content via mobile devices thanks to the ubiquity of mobile devices and advancement in communication technology. In the mobile consumption environment, moving content such as videos are much more powerful in drawing users' attention than static content such as images. Nevertheless, users typically need to actuate video player controls to consume moving media content, which disrupts users' viewing experience. Alternatively, automatically playing videos can be annoying, and users often scroll past or otherwise navigate away from these automatically played videos before they are completed.